Robot Beats Humans in Air Hockey

Last week we brought you a podcast about a vision of
robots beating soccer players. This week,
we report the reality
of a robot beating humans at air hockey. Designed by General
Electric Fanuc and programmed by Nuvation Research Corp, the robot plays
a mostly defensive strategy. Its vision tracking system send coordinates
to a board every 10 milliseconds. Using 32-bit ColdFire microcontrollers
and a C program, the robot will defend its goal, only attacking when
it is confident about the puck's position. The developers claim that the
robot has "defeated even the best human air hockey players by a ratio of
three to one." There is a video of the robot.